Still

Your body is yours now – your skin stretches
comfortably around its heights and its
depths, its hills and crevices, the scars of
old, the sights, the colours, the smells, all
that you have absorbed in your life –
the joy and the pain.
Your soul nestles within – it even
purrs at times.
You breathe.

But still,
there are moments.
When darkness beckons and your soul
trembles; when you feel jagged and hollow, like
a bottomless void, a continent with howling
winds and dark storms, sheer cliffs and
parched deserts, wild animals that
roam hungry, icy crevasses where
no light can reach.

Perhaps this is how it was at
the beginning, when you lay
shrouded in darkness, and raged
against the dying light, the
confined space, the relentless thump
of your mother’s heartbeat, an
echo of things to come.